For those who are interested, Brad Wardell did a full-episode interview with Troy Goodfellow's Flash of Steel podcast in which he talks in some detail about Elemental. The show starts with a segment about Demigod and its launch woes, but shifts over to Elemental just before the halfway point.

After seeing the amazing starships made by players (and reviewers) in GC2's ship designer, we decided fairly early to make customization a huge part of the Elemental experience. And while this has resulted in a longer tool-development period than GC2, the current results with those tools have been really exciting.

Case in point: our new Particle Engine (and coorisponding in-game Particle Editor). Obviously, since we're making a fantasy game, we would need some fantastic spells spell effects to get players excited. Besides spells, every weapon swung, item used, dungeon cleared, and acheivement acheived would require it's own special effect. To acheve this we (Ross and Paul) created the Particle Editor, a mighty in-game workshop for the artists (and players) to create effects with.

Oh, hell. I don't ever do this, but I want in on this one from the ground up, and if preorders all get to participate in the beta through the course of development, well, I think I'm going to get my preorder in tonight!

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As Elemental players know, I had been on Elemental since early this year. Then…Demigod was released and the online experience for that game has been a total cluster. So I had to “assign myself” to Demigod to figure out what the deal was and make sure it got fixed.

In my view, too many moving parts. I’m not a huge fan of multiplayer-centric games in the first place. I’m particularly not a fan of peer to peer multiplayer-centric games on the PC because on the PC, unlike on the console, the developer is stuck writing this stuff – or in Demigod’s case, the publisher had to go out and license stuff which turned out to be a disaster.

But now my time on Demigod is starting to come to an end – at least in terms of it dominating my life. I’m looking forward to working on a game that we’re both developing and publishing so I don’t have to take a beating for things I can’t really do anything about.

Ramifications

I had to assign both Cari and Jesse (our two top game developers) to Demigod to largely rewrite the multiplayer system. This will have an impact on Elemental’s schedule. Sorry. People paid good money for Demigod and you know me, I am not about assigning blame or caring whose fault something is so my attitude is that the problem had to be solved quickly.

They’re still on Demigod this week working with developer Gas Powered Games on a slew of new APIs that will let the game be expanded well into the future. Then they can get back to Elemental next week.

Demigod’s impact on Elemental

The good news is that because we ended up having to develop our own multiplayer module to help with Demigod, we can use that on Elemental. Now, to be crystal clear: Elemental is a single player centric game. It will have multiplayer but to be honest, I’m not willing to sacrifice a single feature of the game for multiplayer. So if multiplayer is your main thing, you might as well stay away from Elemental.

That said, here are a few things that multiplayer in Elemental will have:

1. Multiplayer games will be hosted by us. Period. No peer to peer. Not even hosted on the user’s box. Our servers. No ports, no proxies, nothing. We’re hosting it.

2. I’m killing off the bots concept. People hate them. I thought they were cool but they’re too much work only to be hated. So there won’t be artificial players.

3. We will support empires (clans), scheduled games, and group join from the start since those features will get added (by us) to Demigod.

Fewer moving parts

We are revisiting the way the economy works in Elemental to simplify it. There’s been some positive developments that I can’t talk about yet. The short version though is there will be likely be a lot lot lot more story to Elemental than anything we’ve done before. Each sand box game should feel like an epic story if we do it right. We’ll see.

Release dates

I can say that Beta 0 is not going to happen in June now. We might be able to do an Alpha then but that will only go out to a very tiny number of people (maybe 100 tops). I’m reserving 10 places and the rest will come from the pre-order pool as a lottery with points given to those who have GalCiv II + Sins + Demigod. Beta 0 would likely be July at this point but I’ll know more at the end of the week.

There's a few things here I'm saddened about. The removal of the Bots - they sounded ingenious! I loved the idea of bots joining games, where you'd be hard pressed to distinguish them from the normal players. I wonder how this will impact the previous mentioned AI coding, that would be continuously monitored and expanded on by Brad himself?

The simplifying of economics - It seems that everytime we see a game with great potential talking about a complex system , that system gets cut down. I like complex, as long as its not just a spreadsheet game. If its done to cater to the "I want a quick game" masses, I'm not amused

pushing back of open beta - oh well, guess it was unavoidable due to demigods troubles. Brad doesnt sound particular happy about Demigods launch though, but nice to see that something good comes out of it.

I liked the bots idea too, but if it's not turning out well in playtesting, we're quite possibly better off just seeing that feature chopped now so they can focus development time on better features.

I'm glad the game is being focused primarily on single player but still having multiplayer done well. Sins of a Solar Empire feels like a good balance of solo and MP playability to me, hopefully they hit a similar mixture with Elemental.

The shift from economy to story is curious. His statement of making even the sandbox game modes feel like epic stories is intriguing. Maybe we'll get the kind of world-building and the marching of time that you see in Dwarven Fortress? I can hope!

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I liked the bots idea too, but if it's not turning out well in playtesting, we're quite possibly better off just seeing that feature chopped now so they can focus development time on better features.

It's interesting to say "people hate them" regarding the bots prior to larger scale beta testing. Who are these people that hated them? I think it's a bit presumptuous to simply assume the general public will also hate what the relatively small testing base does. Kind of disappointing.

My pleasure - I'm really, really looking forward to this game. Stardock is a stellar game maker in my book, and the few beta's I've been lucky enough to participate in with them, have been great experiences, where the devs listen to what you say...

I think we need a nay sayer. The game sounds awesome but and it's a big but. Brad confesses to not understanding or emjoying mp games. On the other hand I find it difficult to enjoy playing with myself

So whilst I am piqued neither gcii or sins for me was worth the price. Demigod on the other hand has proved very much worth price of admission.

Before anyone chimes in I appretiate this is aimed at the sp market which IMHO is a lost opportunity

not if you enjoy SP games, right? I do, I love them, I rarely play against others, cant be bothered to take the time out of the day to do so. I Have so many other things in RL pressing in from time to time that I'd much rather do, than be forced to play with someone else, and thus being forced set aside anything else.

But, its different strokes I guess, and yes - this game is aimed at the SP market, which I think is a wonderfull thing ;-)

I understand and at the same time I don't. The interaction in an mp game will always beat an sp game. Then add in the tactics and regardless of ai you'll never match the sheer genius and sheer stupidity of a human player. But cutting to the quick can you honestly say you get better value out of sp than mp. If I take dg 120 hours world in conflict 130 hours. No other sp game have I come close. They tend to be 5 minute wonders imho

As both games tend to last less than 40mins per game I don't buy the time argument

I wonder how this whole Elemental will look/play like. I'd like to try the demo, but i'm similar in this matter to Tals: interacting with real life people in mp is much more enjoyable (sometimes the opposite ) than interacting with computer(AI). Besides playing with friends is much more fun than playing alone. When i look at xfire top games i think that most of the people tend to multiplayer. Though everyone is different and likes what he likes (btw. i've played 175 hours of demigod mp so far, and still i'm not bored with it)

I love Stardock for concentrating on SP. I don't like MP, although I would like to play Blood Bowl in MP. I can play when I want, quit when I want, don't have to deal with obnoxious people, wait for them to move, worry about them quitting if I am winning, or feel like an idiot because I lost against someone who does nothing but play the game for 20 hours a day.

We're never going to end this one. Partly my fault for starting it but as I said before I don't like playing with myself its totally soulless. Sure what lee mentions can happen. At the same time playing on voip with the other gt players is pretty unbeatable. Where else could you be playing with a guy from Poland,Denmark, Hawaii and mainland us. I do get the whole sp play when you want leave when you want. I just don't get how it could keep someone interested without the story. Much like playing chess against ai is not that fun or you wouldn't consider monopoly against ai. The hardest thing in mp is getting the group once you have that its an unbeatable experience

aye, can we please leave this debacle behind now, or start another thread for it? Elemental alpha is getting close, and Beta is only a month away or so, so lots of juicy stuff coming out for those interested in the next few days

I don't even understand why there's a debate here. The game is going to support both single player and multiplayer. If previous experience on my part is any indication, it's very plausible to see a solid effort on both fronts.

Me, I'm hugely excited for Elemental on both counts. I'm looking forward to some great AI for solo play and also excited at the prospect of playing it with friends. The best of both worlds!

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I generally prefer strategy games as single-player and will play FPSs as multiplayer more often. The problem with strategy games is you're locked down with a usually small number of people for an extended period of time. This becomes a problem because no one has developed a good matchmaking system, so you're often up against total noobs or griefers, or against someone who's memorized optimal build orders, hotkeys, and has 1 billion actions per minute. I've rarely played against someone similar to my skill level in strategy multiplayer. With FPS you usually play with a larger pool of players at a time and can easily jump between ongoing matches if something doesn't suit you.